- Essay https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-latest-u-s-intelligence-leaks-are-no-surprise-2b902835?reflink=integratedwebview_share
The Latest U.S. Intelligence Leaks Are No Surprise
The classified documents recently posted online show that the intelligence community still hasn’t remedied long-standing problems with securing America’s biggest secrets
Oleg Smolenkov knows the dangers of leaks. For nearly a decade, the Russian official was the CIA’s most valuable spy in the Kremlin. Then in 2017 he received a coded message from his spymaster in Langley to immediately pack up, gather his family and get on a plane for Montenegro. From there, the agency quietly exfiltrated Mr. Smolenkov, his wife and three young children to a safe house in the U.S. It was just in time. A few weeks later leaked information appeared in the Washington Post pointing to a likely CIA agent-in-place very close to President Vladimir Putin.
Now a new leak of national-security secrets is drawing attention to possible American spies in Russia. On Thursday FBI agents arrested Jack Teixeira, 21, an airman first class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, and charged him with posting highly classified information about American support for the Ukrainian war effort to an online gaming chat group. “U.S. intelligence appears to have penetrated nearly every Russian military body, including the General Staff, the Defense Ministry and the GRU military intelligence agency, as well as the private mercenary group Wagner,” wrote Russia’s independent, English-language Moscow Times this week. Agents of Russia’s FSB are undoubtedly now engaged in a frantic spy hunt.
The actual contents of the leaks are concerning enough, but they point to a deeper problem that has been evident for more than a decade: the collapse of the U.S. government’s capacity to protect national-security documents and engage in counterintelligence activities. Mr. Teixeira’s method was apparently very simple: He stuffed documents into his pockets, walked out the door, photographed them and put them online.
The leaks come at a moment of unprecedented danger. For the first time the U.S. and Russia, two nuclear-armed superpowers, are engaged in a deadly, prolonged proxy war that might quickly turn into a hot war. According to one of the secret leaked documents, a Russian fighter jet came very close to shooting down a British spy plane last Sept. 29 off the Crimean coast. Had the missile hit its target, killing more than two dozen British military personnel, it might easily have sparked a direct confrontation with the West.
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In addition to hunting for moles, Russian intelligence will now almost certainly begin looking for compromised communications channels and change its codes to plug the ears of the NSA’s eavesdroppers. Several of the leaked documents clearly indicate that the information was derived from signals intelligence—that is, intercepted electronic communications. Such intelligence provided the NSA with details, for instance, on Wagner’s hiring of Russian prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
As damaging as the leaked files are, they represent only a minute fraction of the mammoth number of super-classified documents and dangerous cyberweapons the intelligence community has lost over the past few years. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor at Booz Allen assigned to the NSA, was able to walk out of the agency with pocket-loads of flash drives containing upwards of a million pages of documents. The agency didn’t even know the data was missing until Mr. Snowden fled the country and announced the news in Hong Kong.
In the aftermath of the Snowden scandal, the NSA claimed that it had tightened up its security to make sure that such a breach would never happen again. Yet just three years later, another Booz Allen contractor assigned to the NSA, Hal Martin, was arrested for stealing more than half a billion pages of documents, including from the most secret organization in the agency, the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, which focuses on hard targets like Russia and China. It was impossible to tell who else may have had access to the mountain of data.
Around the same time, a person or persons calling themselves the Shadow Brokers announced that they had stolen the NSA’s most dangerous cyberweapons and were putting the software up for auction on the internet. From all indications, the “Shadow Brokers” were likely another former employee of the NSA’s TAO unit. When the auction turned out to be a bust, the Shadow Brokers simply released the cyberweapons on the internet. Soon after, both North Korea and Russia downloaded the weapons and used them to attack countries around the world, including the U.S. To this day, no arrests have been made.
The FBI’s counterintelligence organization has been thoroughly penetrated by Russian and Chinese moles for the past 40 years.
And then there are the moles. The principal agency responsible for U.S. counterintelligence is the FBI, yet almost continuously for the past 40 years the bureau’s counterintelligence organization has been thoroughly penetrated by Russian and Chinese moles. From 1979 until 2001, Robert Hanssen, a senior counterintelligence official, spied for Russia, delivering bag-loads of secrets including the names of local agents in Russia, many of whom were killed.
Despite Mr. Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, about a month later, according to federal charges, China was able to recruit a former CIA officer, Alexander Ma, to become a mole in the FBI’s Hawaii office. For almost 20 years, Mr. Ma was allegedly able to steal highly secret documents dealing with CIA operations in China, copy them on digital media and fly to Shanghai to deliver them personally to his spymasters. Then he would simply fly back to Hawaii and return to work at the FBI counterintelligence office, no questions asked. During that period, many local Chinese agents working for the CIA were killed. It wasn’t until 2020 that he was caught, and he is currently awaiting trial.
Having spent the past few years doing research on the failure of U.S. security and counterintelligence operations, I was not surprised that someone in the Pentagon or at an intelligence agency was able to grab stacks of super-secret documents, shove them in a pocket, walk out the door and post them on the internet.
A key problem is the utter lack of accountability within the intelligence community and the FBI. In the wake of losing hundreds of millions of the country’s highest secrets, along with most of the agency’s cyberweapons, NSA Director Michael Rogers, a three-star admiral, paid no price, keeping his stars, pay and job. Nor were any FBI directors given the boot for allowing the bureau to be infiltrated by Russian and Chinese spies for decades, a situation that led to the death of perhaps dozens of courageous CIA informants in both countries.
As the most recent leaker has demonstrated, physical security for classified documents remains as nonexistent as when Edward Snowden and Hal Martin walked out the door with their enormous troves. One solution would be to install at exits the same type of metal detectors everyone must go through before they board a plane, the kind that can detect flash drives and documents stuffed in pockets, or anywhere else on the body.
Had such actions been taken several years ago, Oleg Smolenkov might still be sitting in the Kremlin passing on critical intelligence on Russia’s war plans, or nuclear threats.
Mr. Bamford’s most recent book, from which some of this essay is adapted, is “Spyfail: Spies, Moles, Saboteurs and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.”